Do something to the Gravity Drive exploit.

Don't get me wrong, I love Gravity Drives. They present an awesome engineering problem when designing ships that's very satisfying to solve. Plus they're a neat alternative to thrusters. If you ask me, they should stay in the game as a mechanic, but something obviously needs to be done to them to make this mechanic balanced.

Here are a few options:
1) Make them much weaker.
2) Make them consume much more energy (my favorite option)
3) Both
4) Just disable the mechanic (which will be difficult if GG and AM blocks stay in the game).

Whatever you awesome folks at KSH decide to do with them, please don't hold it off because your decision will drastically affect how PVP ships are designed.

 

Gravity drives cannot be balanced. They scale with internal volume, while thrusters scale with external area. They can be heavily armoured and thrusters need crazy amounts of internal space to do so. They just need removing from the game by giving aritificial mass blocks some reaction force to the generator. Its not an engineering challenge in the slightest, just stick a cube of artificial mass blocks on your COM and be done with it.

there far cheaper than thrusters, and because of how well they scale they always will be at some size.

 

if i remember correctly someone suggested that an artificial mass block could simply check the current grid for any gravity generators.
and if it finds one..it shouldn't function.

frankly its the most fun when used with high speed mods.

create a warp game like that thing in mass effect.
line your artificial mass block ship up fly towards it and WOOSH!...good luck stopping buddy!

 

And what happens when it's attached, but not on the same grid?

Even if you account for landing gears, it's probably possible to set something up with gravity generators or physical chain-links.

 

You can remove gravity drives from the game, but what will you do about magnetic force drives? They easily beat gravity drives in cost, energy, and force provided. Of course at the cost of complexity and the use of rotors. In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's the link https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=910527327

 

We would still be able to make gravity drives with large rocks like in the olden days.



Gravity drives are fun, you still can't go faster than thrusters... all you get is nice acceleration and they are hard to balance in terms of making the gravity drive push the ship perfectly forward.

 

Large rocks tend to damage blocks, even at low speed differences.

 

Two words, Landing gear.

 

5) dont use them while letting others to use
6) if you want add a rule to your server to proibhite gravity drives
7) there is a mod for this (90% of suggestions/requests have one or more mod that implements stuff)
8) disable Mass Blocks.

 

May i just point out how overpowered and imbalanced gravity drives are by referencing @jerry060599,

https://forum.keenswh.com/threads/jrgd-jerry-rigged-torque-canceling-gravity-drive.7393784/

He made a very nice script that allows torque cancellation of gravity drives. but the most important thing, with ragards to balance of this thing is the quite below.

So a 7X7X7 drive is 48 times more volume efficient than the most powerful thruster in the game, without counting the exhaust burn, and without counting any fuel at all. Assuming you want 6 mins of full burn, a large tank per thruster, this then becomes 96 times more volume efficient. This is just absurd, and is game breaking to any PVP server who allows such drives.

 

Is that still possible? Pretty sure anything locked to the landing gears any longer is "safety locked". Since I consider gravdrives a cheat, I haven't tried...

 

I'm curious @Malware programmatically is there any reason not to apply Newton's third law here, make it so any time a gravity gen effects an object a counter force is applied to the grid the gravity gen is on. Honestly that seems to be the easiest solution, it kills the gravity drive but let's gravity cannons and the like still function.

 

Artificial gravity need to work like natural gravity, so gravity drives will become extremely dangerous

 

Not that I can tell, but I haven't worked with Havok. I can't imagine that. I mean, obviously every addition involving physics will add performance pressure, but... Yeah, like I said, I don't think it'd be a problem. This is the solution I myself have backed in the past. But the sad truth is that the troll drive is highly desired by lots of players, so removing it would result in community fire...

@Saberwulfy Imagine any number of gravity fields in any number of random directions having an effect on every single grid in its range... shudders My poor, poor CPU...

 

The same was true about inertial dampeners. The complaints died down fairly quickly.

 

First of all, the anger about the inertial dampers were relatively mild, because people for the most part seemed to understand that there was a very good reason to remove it - at least after being explained said reason. The removal of the gravity drive doesn't really have that kind of an explicit reason, it's mostly "it's unrealistic" and "I don't like it". Second, The change in dampers didn't leave ships completely useless, just slower to stop. One simply needed to adapt flight style. Removing the grav drive will render builds completely obsolete - Finally, a lot of people simply love the gravity drive itself, if nothing else because it's an actual engineering challenge to balance the drive.

Now trust me, if I were in charge, the GD would have been gone as soon as I realized such an exploit existed. But Keen left it in too long, and the SE leads don't have the same priorities I do: They actually care if something breaks, and try their damnedest to avoid that if they can. In my opinion, that gets in the way, and I believe this has been one of Keen's problems. You see plenty of other EA games out there simply obsoleting save games, forcing people to start over. Now I probably wouldn't have gone that far, but if I wanted to make a change that had certain advantages in the long run, or repaired gameplay balance or things like that, I'd just do it. People would eventually understand. Plus, it's an early access game. If one does not understand that things will change drastically, and work might be lost during development, one should not play such games.

 

I am sure there are plenty out there who list messing with gravity as one of their top "awesome!!!" things about SE. I mean just playing with gravity is magic and so are Jump Drives. I say leave it as it is, in survival they can be quite helpful for getting around when short on resources. Now if they make thrusters more efficient or something then maybe they can compete with a well made and balanced GD. The fact that in vanilla they are confined to large grids is a sort of game balance in itself. Now if they disable the mechanic I am sure the stinker will be worse than the one raised over the female Doctor Who, but who cares because the Blue Box is still AWESOME and so will the Gravity Drives remain just as awesome.

 

I only use GravDrive in orbits due to the best kw/kg ratio. and to counter that you cannot really orbit and can only fake it with power.

 

its all fun and games until you get crushed to death until the devastating force of 100 vengeful gravity drives.
....or screw up and watch your ship spin off into the distance...

something is bound to be done....or not....

if a ship loses the ability to use a gravity gen and artificial mass that could be a good way to make it extremely had to use

 

Big warning sign outside the engine room..

 

Oh, i hate that! That's enough to make me ragequit a game an never look back.
Change the balance, break my builds, but don't invalidate my whole savegame.
--- Automerge ---

WTF is going on here?! Someone please explain to me the principle of how that works!

 

Gravity drive .... and abuse of physics but in keeping with how the game engine deals with stuff.

magnetic fore drive .... er....I'd call that a bug!

Whether such things should exist is a moot point, depending on your view of 'realism' but the OP's point is still valid. If Keen do not remove them from the game, they need to at least balance them.

 

Merge blocks have a pulling effect to snap grids into place, and it scales upwards with mass (effectively ignoring it.) The clang drive is set up to continuously exploit the effect in a given direction.

 

Marvelous! Seems really tricky to get to work. I would never have thought to use rotors.

 

Clang drive is currently the best propulsion system in the game. A single solar panel can power a clang drive which can accelerate a ship of any mass to 100m/s almost instantly under any conditions. Gravity drives don't work on planets and take way more power and resources to build.

 

It does have certain drawbacks though...

 

True, the added complexity and potential explosions can be a problem. Still it is my preferred method simply because it scales infinitely, works in gravity, and it pretty much free. Can build backup clang drives just incase your primary one.....clangs.....

 

I would say that "one" way to fix the grav drives would be both:
a) Increasing the cost of building a Gravity Generator and Artificial Mass blocks, so making them would be expensive.
b) Increasing a LOT the power usage.

Just doing that would be a nice fix to balance. Grav Drives can be countered with more Gravity, they do not work in planets. Grav. Generators are troll science on it's own, so I don't think banning them would be wise. Clang Drives are troll AND bug science and should be fixed in some way, but they are extremely dangerous also.

Having a realistic approach to grav (Newton's law and so) would increase CPU load far too much. So I think just having a power & cost limitation would be the easiest and better balance fix (at least to start with)

 

But that also nerfs their legitimate uses, such as item collection.

I don't think adding Newton's law would really affect CPU load much. It's already calculating the effect on one object. All they have to do is apply it to the other.

 

Why not add a limit to speed acceleration? Much like there is a limit to max speed.
Also boost effectiveness of small ion thrusters to make gravity drives less necessary.